[mahogany]

> But the problem with mainstream social media platforms prohibiting content is that it fuels the extremism it's trying to combat.

I've held this belief before but now I'm not so sure. Is this actually quantifiable? For example, I'd be interested to know if there are people or groups that have grown in size/reach after (and more specifically, because of) being banned from major platforms.

In fact, you just said that you're not familiar with these alternatives -- doesn't that hint that the banned groups might be now reaching a smaller audience? If they weren't banned, you might have seen them on the more mainstream sites.

[native_samples]

They tend to reach smaller audiences but not that much smaller. It's been only a few months since Alex Berenson got banned from Twitter (for a tweet that contained true statements taken from the US government's own documents, sigh), and his audience on Substack is now closing in on his prior Twitter audience. Given they're different mediums and he would have had some lapsed followers (e.g. who followed him in older times but no longer paid attention), that's not too bad, especially as it's much easier to monetize the new Substack audience.

Other people who got cancelled or pushed out - like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald - now stand to get really very rich indeed off their new audiences. Writing, it turns out, can be profitable. Just not the sort of writing you find in most media outlets. This also applies to Scott Alexander, quoted above, though he wasn't directly cancelled, "just" doxxed by the New York Times.

Does this fuel extremism? Well it certainly fuels distrust of large institutions and mainstream media narratives, although what "mainstream" means is increasingly unclear. Joe Rogan pointed out the other day that given CNN's tiny audience sizes, it's really Rogan that's mainstream and CNN that's the fringe now. Groups like CNN, MSNBC, even the BBC seem increasingly extremist to me. The rationality and moderation you might hope for from older journalistic institutions is now to be found elsewhere, like the places they like to insinuate are full of extremists.

[tomjen3]

When the donald was on reddit there was some limits on what they could do. When they got banned they moved to their own domain and there was no limit whatever.

[consumer451]

> there was no limit whatever.

There were certainly limits on speech that did not fall in line with t_d's world view. As there are in all conservative venues aside from r/tuesday AFAIK.

If anyone is aware of somewhere that is conservative, and is interested in honest debate, I am interested.

[tomjen3]

I don’t think that is possible, in so far as there aren’t any actual conservatives in places like that.

By definition, conservatives want to conserve the status quo, someone who is a conservative wouldn’t rock the boat as much as Trump did.

If you want to hear somebody arguing the conservative case, try the early podcasts with Joe Rogan.